


Face with a View

by le_mru



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anti-Werewolf Prejudice, Dom/sub Undertones, Dumbledore is a prick, Explicit Language, First War with Voldemort, Implications of Period-Typical Homophobia, Lie Low At Lupin's (Harry Potter), M/M, Minor Character Death, Recreational Drug Use, Rough Sex, certain liberties taken with background characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2020-12-14 08:47:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21013007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/le_mru/pseuds/le_mru
Summary: It all rather feels like Remus is on a journey where he only discovers what the stops are just as he’s forcibly pulled over. He’s not sure where he’s going but it seems rather clear it’s nowhere good. Sirius has got a hole in his memory the size of Yorkshire, but he's still here, he's alive and kicking, like the bloody Count of Monte Cristo.A story of break-down and restoration in two parts.





	Face with a View

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Wolfstar Games 2019. 
> 
> Team: Journey  
Prompt: [This Must be the Place by The Talking Heads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVoPzA0g3Ac&list=RDrVoPzA0g3Ac)
> 
> Dedicated to my girlfriend and my best friend both, who gave me the idea for this and continuously makes fun of me not being as fast and effective as Stephen King.

1.

He bursts into the bathroom and locks the door behind him, then pushes his hands into his hair. He needs to allow himself at least a minute to fully register the sheer terror of this moment before he can think and breathe and comfort Sirius whose anguished cry can be heard in the adjoining room.

He leans against the washbasin and looks into the mirror. His eyes are huge in his ashen, still face. The whole family gone, wiped out. It's fucking mass murder. It’s terrorism. He’s never going to share a clandestine cigarette with Marlene again. She was Sirius’ first and only girlfriend. He liked her sense of humour. And now she’s gone, and her family too, and they were in fucking hiding, which means that someone had leaked their location.

He lets out a shuddering breath and tries to clamp down on the panic. It works: the next breaths come slower and deeper, but his knuckles on the basin are still bone-white.

Beyond the shock and grief and terror, something forms at the back of his mind, clean and sharp like a knife: _someone is bound to think I did it_. It’s horrible enough that his self-preservation kicks in when he should be mourning his friend and her family, but it does, and it’s never without reason. He remembers Dearborn’s and Sturgis’ comments last week when he wouldn’t divulge where he’d been or what he’d been doing: _well that’s not very encouraging, Lupin. What I’m hearing sounds more like an excuse than an explanation. What are we supposed to think now?_

He sniffles and wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. The first time it happened--the trap the Prewetts fell into--he found it easier to believe someone slipped or that it was just a coincidence or a really brilliant move on the Death Eaters’ side. It clearly isn’t this time, now that_ the McKinnons are dead_.

The mirror still reflects his anguished expression. He rubs his face, schools it into something palatable, then unlocks the door and exits the solace of the bathroom. The hall is in disarray: Arthur Weasley is writing something down frantically, Alice Longbottom is interrogating Moody for details, her voice rising with every question, while Frank is attempting to make tea, but the mugs keep falling out of his shaking hands. Peter is holding down Sirius, whose eyes are wild, fists swinging at an invisible enemy.

“Sirius.” Remus comes up to him and grabs his wrists. Sirius’ eyes have trouble focusing on him. “Padfoot. Come on.”

“She’s dead, Moony,” Sirius says, as if Remus could have not heard.

“Yeah.” He nods at Peter who takes a step back. Peter is flushed and sweaty, his eyes glazed over as if on the brink of tears. “I’m so sorry, Padfoot.”

Sirius sags in his grip and allows Remus to sit on the armrest and pull his head to his chest. Moody is looking at them suspiciously but Remus doesn’t care, he just cradles Sirius’ head to him, and Sirius’ arms go around his middle. Sirius is trembling with repressed emotion, but not crying. Sirius never cries.

Frank finally succeeds in brewing tea and redistributes mugs to everyone in attendance. Dumbledore comes in, looking a little sick himself, to say a few words and start a discussion on what to do next. No one says anything about a spy, but they are all thinking it, Remus is certain of it. At some point, Sirius leans over and says in a whisper:

“I need to find the bloody bastard who did this.”

“Sirius. This--how?”

“I don’t know. I’ll think of something.” Sirius’ eyes search his face and his hand squeezes Remus’ knee under the table.

Dumbledore and Moody reassign assignments individually, to prevent any leaks. Remus anticipates being sent away to bumfuck nowhere again, but Dumbledore graciously assigns him to spy on a suspect locale in London with Sirius. Before they part, Dumbledore leans over to Remus, looking at him over his half-moon spectacles, and says:

“Keep an eye on Sirius, would you? It seems like he’s been having trouble coping, and I am concerned about him.”

Which translates roughly to _I’ve managed to notice from my fucking high horse that he’s been drinking heavily and unravelling when circumstances make him stay relatively sober_ and Remus’ lips twist to prepare for a scorching reply, but he reconsiders and just nods. What good it would make to mouth off to Dumbledore on the day when Marlene McKinnon died, anyway.

They Apparate home via four transfer points to make sure they’re not being followed, which makes Remus slightly nauseous. The moment they walk in, Sirius makes a beeline for the drinks cabinet and pours himself a hefty serving of whisky that he gulps down in one go. Expertly pretending not to see, Remus goes into the kitchen, but the thought of food makes him queasy even though he’s only had breakfast today, and it feels like that was a hundred years ago. He, too, feels a hundred years old as he hunches over the kitchen table, leafing absentmindedly through an old newspaper. It’s a wonder he’s not dead yet himself--it must be a mark of his werewolf resilience or maybe it’s all the effort he’s been putting into pretending that as long as they’re together they will be okay, that love will save them in the end, somehow; back straight, head held high, ignoring the bodies he’s walking over.

The floor in the living room creaks agonisingly, like it always does when someone comes up to the stereo. There’s some rustling and the sound of the turntable scraping as it’s starting to play The Cure’s _Seventeen Seconds_, which is a sure-fire sign Sirius is ready to start spiralling. Remus heaves himself up from the table and comes into the room to find Sirius on the sofa, brooding, another glass half-empty already. It feels moot to tell him to stop drinking while he’s still more or less himself.

Remus sits down next to him. It’s only when the first side of the record comes to an end that Sirius turns his head to him and says:

“I need to know who it is.” He is enunciating theatrically, like he always does when he wants to make a dramatic point that he’s thought about for so long it’s about to burst out of him. “I have to know so that I can find the bastard and kill him for the Prewetts and--and the McKinnons.”

“We don’t even know for sure there’s a spy, Sirius,” Remus says even though in his heart of hearts he knows.

“Bollocks. There has to be. You’re just too naive to believe that it can be one of our friends--”

“I’m not naive, we both tried to figure out what happened to the Prewetts and--”

“But it has to be. No one else knew about the McKinnons. Maybe it’s bloody Sturgis, he’s always been this shady--”

“So what do you want to do, spy on Sturgis Podmore now?”

Sirius stares at him in the gathering gloom. His eyes are dark and his breath has the acrid smell of whisky.

“So what if I do?” he says with a scowl. “And you--you’re probably going to bury your head in the sand like you always do, and how is that fucking better, Moony? What if James and Lily are going to be next? What then?”

“I know, but--”

“I’m going to find him and kill him--or her--or get killed in the process, I don’t care.”

“Don’t say shite like that,” Remus says and hates how his voice breaks. “Sirius.”

“Why? We’re going to die anyway, I might just as well choose the way I want to go!”

He launches himself off the sofa and goes to the cupboard, to refill his drink with shaking hands. Remus feels something cold and suffocating crawl up his insides to his throat and he realizes it’s fear. _This is what Snape must have felt facing the wolf in the Shack_, he thinks out of nowhere. Something monstrous, bloodthirsty and seemingly unavoidable.

He gets up to take a shower and Sirius steps in his way.

“I am heartbroken over this too,” he says before Sirius says anything stupid again, and wraps his fingers around Sirius’ arm. “And--we’ll think of something, just don’t do anything rushed and daft and--”

“Sure,” Sirius snorts, turning away. “You coward.”

Remus slaps him across the face before he has time to think what Sirius is doing and why.

“Let’s hope you’re going to be this fucking fierce when they come for us,” Sirius barks and Remus is finally, officially, inadvertently done with pretending. He slaps him again, hard, because Sirius expects it and enjoys it, and pushes him down onto the sofa. Sirius goes down easily, arms and legs opening for Remus, and ultimately it’s better to have a violent shag than to drink or cry or beat up Sturgis Podmore, so that’s what he does. He wraps his fist in Sirius’ hair and bites him on the neck so hard Sirius gives a strangled cry, his hand tightening convulsively on Remus’ shoulder blade. Contrary to what Sirius seems to think of him, he’s not a coward at all, he’s facing this great fucking yawning darkness head on, he’s just not about to jump down into it like an idiot.

He turns Sirius around and holds him down with his palm, pressing his face into the cushions so that all the sounds he makes are muffled. Sirius feels different than he used to: his edges rough and the inside hollow. It’s startlingly obvious that somewhere along the way he’s turned into a wiry, hardened version of the beautiful boy Remus fell in love with at school, it’s just that Remus must have missed it before. The sun is coming down, the McKinnons are dead, and he fucks Sirius on the sofa so hard his thighs burn and tremble with the effort. It’s a wonder that he can split his attention between being so aroused and so strangely detached from it: his hands on Sirius’ narrow hips, thumbs pressing into the dimples above his bum, his mind bewildered over how they arrived at this exact point in space and time.

He doesn’t realize yet, but this is the last time they will have had sex in the next dozen years or so. If he knew, he would have probably celebrated it more, not just made Sirius come and gone to take a shower, and cried a little under the spray.

They stake out the place Dumbledore assigned them to the following day. Sirius doesn’t want to talk about the spy anymore, but the moment they can leave he’s off to pry information from Moody. Against his better judgement, Remus follows him to the McKinnons’ house, even though it’s going to probably grant him nightmares for the next month or so. Then they follow Sturgis Podmore around the whole day, which turns out to be a bust twice over: Sturgis is boring, completely indubious and, alarmingly, blissfully unaware he’s being followed despite Moody’s haranguing over constant vigilance.

Sirius is moody and volatile and fiercely missing James, but it’s still better having him close than running off Merlin knows where. His temper is a comfort: so many things are dead and gone, or irrevocably altered, but Sirius still manages to piss him off in 0.5 seconds flat. Remus constantly craves his smile, his smell, presses his face to Sirius’ shoulder on the motorbike and inhales him deeply before they put their helmets on. He feels different with Sirius around, which is why it’s such a blow when Dumbledore sends him to the Isle of Skye to negotiate with the fucking selkies. Selkies don’t care about wizards and he doubts they ever will.

When he comes back after a week or so, the flat looks abandoned. _Sirius’ moved out_, flashes through his mind before he banishes the thought as irrational. It’s Sirius’ flat, after all, why would he just leave? _Unless he’s dead_, his mind supplies, and Remus freezes, but his treacherous brain continues as if this is just a normal train of thought. _And it means you have to move out. You’re not his spouse after all. You will not inherit anything from him. Most of all, you will never see him turn his head, catch your eyes and smile at you like you have a shared secret, and you do, you have a lot of secrets between the two of you--_

There’s no note left, no sign when he might be back, and all the milk in the fridge has gone bad, so Remus shoots a few panicked, feebly coded messages to people, even though he really shouldn’t. A quick answer from Dorcas has him almost crying in relief. He’s still clutching the note in shaking fingers, sitting in the dark kitchen, when Sirius starts wrestling with the wards on the door.

“Where have you been?” He sets upon Sirius on the hall, unthinking, really, because if not for how pissed Sirius is he would have ended up a wet stain on the wall.

“What the hell, Moony.” Sirius blinks owlishly, lowering his wand. “It’s you. You gave me such a fright, bloody hell.”

Sirius comes closer and puts his arms around Remus’ neck. He smells like four pints and a pack of cigarettes. Remus pulls him in close and pushes his nose into Sirius’ hair regardless.

“I had no idea you were coming back today.” Sirius disentangles from him and attempts to toe his boots off. Remus is watching him, hands hanging loose at his sides, empty. “I was just out with Pete and the boys. You know how it gets. Were you worried?”

“Of course I was worried, you daft bugger.”

Sirius flops onto the floor and starts unlacing his left boot.

“You know who you should be worried about, Moony?

“Who?”

“Dearborn. No one’s heard from him in days.”

Remus knows exactly where this is heading. It’s just like an exhausting _deja vu_, like that moment in a horror movie where you realize the characters are going to get murdered by the monster and no one’s able to do anything about it.

“It can be _anyone_,” Sirius continues. There’s an edge to him, a manic glint in his eyes. “Anyone of us.”

“So what?” Remus asks, suddenly bitter. “Who do you want to follow next? Alice Longbottom?”

“Why not?” Sirius squints at him. “Why are you so opposed to this?”

“Because we wasted a whole day tracking Podmore like twats! And sorry, it doesn’t sit well with me that we’re supposed to suspect our friends just because--just because--”

“Where were you?” Sirius asks, tilting his head. With one of his boots still on and the other one off, sitting on the floor, he looks like a big, angry toddler. “Just now. Where did you come back from?”

“Stop trying to pick a fight with me,” Remus snaps. “You know I can’t tell you.”

“You can’t tell me,” Sirius muses. He seems to be deliberating on something, but what he’s really doing, Remus knows, is just gathering steam. “No one can tell anyone anything. No one knows who is doing what anymore, and what to expect. How can we trust anyone in these fucking circumstances, Moony? It’s as if it’s _designed_ to make us paranoid and crazy and suspicious. Because just think about it--anyone could be leaking information. Fucking _anyone_! It could be you for all I know!”

There’s a beat. Remus feels it sink in fully, like an inhale of poisonous gas, and slowly turns to face Sirius.

“Excuse me? What did you just say?”

Sirius’ eyes go huge and his mouth opens in a little ‘o’ of realisation.

“I meant that--that we have no way of saying who is engaged in what--”

“I’m not interested in what you meant.” He advances on Sirius, tone flat but tense. “I want you to repeat what you just said.”

“Oh, come off it, Moony.” Sirius pinches the bridge of his nose tiredly. “I hardly know what I’m saying sometimes. I meant that--”

“You meant that things have gotten so bad that it could have been me fucking telling on the McKinnons, right? Or making sure Dearborn disappeared?”

“No, not at all! Just that this is making us paranoid and the old man and Moody--no one is helping--”

“It’s good to know what you actually think of me, Sirius.”

And with that, he turns on his heel and leaves. Slams the bedroom door behind him, so that it’s clear to Sirius that he’s not welcome, and changes into his pyjamas, climbs into bed and retrieves his book from the bedside table, but he’s so upset the words swim before his eyes. Then, all of a sudden, everything turns clear and cold and bright, sort of washes down, leaving a very particular, stark presence of mind.

So, somewhere among the myriad of possibilities explaining what has been going in the Order, buried deep in the bundle of nonsense and trivia and song lyrics that makes up Sirius’ mind, there’s a world where Remus is a double agent. Where he’s feeding information to Voldemort or one of his minions. Something in Sirius actually let him treat that as an explanation, however improbable, to what they are currently facing, and he just voiced it by accident, in the middle of one of his tangents.

It really hurts, this mix of disappointment, anger and rejection, viscerally, too: it presses against his chest and makes bile rise in his throat. Even though he’s actually once had Sirius betray him--during the Fifth Year Incident--he would never, ever presume that Sirius is anything less than a hundred percent devoted to their cause. Because that’s what this is to Remus: a betrayal, all the more terrible in the light of everything they’ve shared over the years. He’s revealed himself to Sirius to an almost unbearable degree and this is what he gets in return: a drunken accusation.

He puts the book down and curls on his side. There are some things that he’s kept to himself, of course, mostly because they’re embarrassing and naive: the dream of becoming an academic, writing and grading papers in a tweed suit. Or becoming godfather to Lily and James’ second child, so that they could each have one godchild. Their own house, full of books and light and exotic plants Sirius knows from the patrician orangerie of his childhood. He can now feel these dreams decay, falling into further disrepair each day he’s forced to confront reality.

He eventually falls into a fitful, shallow sleep, and is woken up by the pitter-patter of a dog’s claws on the floor. Padfoot stops at the foot of the bed and whines.

“No,” he tells him sternly. “Just go away. No.”

Padfoot looks at him imploringly and gives another whine. _Damn Sirius_, he knows Remus can never resist Padfoot. He rolls his eyes and pats the bed, and the dog transforms into man mid-lunge onto the mattress.

“I’m so sorry, Moony,” Sirius whispers, leaning over Remus’ feet and kissing his toes. Remus tries to wriggle away, but Sirius grabs him by the ankles and rucks his pyjamas up on his shins to kiss the skin there. “I say shite. That I don’t really think. You know that.”

Remus struggles half-heartedly but Sirius pushes his knees apart with his bare shoulders and kisses him on the groove of his hip. “I know I hurt you. I don’t want to do that.”

“Yes, well, you never want to, but you do it regardless.”

Sirius looks troubled by that. Remus knows he considers himself inherently good and is always somehow surprised at his considerable capacity to be cruel and thoughtless.

“I’m sorry,” Sirius says again, with feeling, and Remus is aware of the following:

Sirius is using the full assortment of his wiles: Padfoot’s pleading eyes, the handsomeness, the hair toss, the drunken, hapless apology. He’s seen it all and what’s more, it always works, at least to some degree. So he welcomes Sirius’ warm body covering his, because comfort is a rare commodity these days, and they go to sleep intertwined, legs tangled together, Remus’ head on Sirius’ shoulder and Sirius’ hands on his back. For a moment, it feels like they’re still a matching set.

In the morning, Sirius acts as if nothing much really happened. They go through the motions: breakfast, then assignments, then an Order meeting in one of the safehouses. There’s more talk of a spy and Remus sees the way Sturgis looks at him, like he knows about his missions and the Dark Creatures he spends his time with and that he’s a Dark Creature himself. Maybe he does know? Sirius does not have a great track record with keeping Remus’ secrets, and it also doesn’t take a genius to figure it out once you notice the monthly absences. Maybe he should start skipping these meetings? On the other hand, he suspects that Dumbledore is gearing up to send him to Greyback’s pack, offer him up on a silver platter, and he desperately wants to avoid that fate. He’ll take Sirius’ half-baked paranoid investigations over that any day.

It turns out that the Potters have to go into permanent hiding. Sirius comes back home and opens the bottle with a resounding, final clunk that says: _I am drinking all of this and you’re not stopping me_. Remus is actually of opposing mind this evening, fed up with going through this nightmare sober. While it plays nicely into his martyr syndrome (which is what Sirius patronisingly called it once in an argument), it’s getting completely unbearable, just like pretending. It all rather feels like Remus is on a journey where he only discovers what the stops are just as he’s forcibly pulled over. He’s not sure where he’s going but it seems rather clear it’s nowhere good.

They drink themselves stupid in silence. Sirius is juggling depressing records on the turntable and Remus torments himself with memories of their life a year and a half ago, when they first learned that James had managed to reproduce. It wasn’t exactly great back then already, or safe, but it was infinitely better than whatever this is, and at least they had each other, and their Friday meet-ups, and he hasn’t yet been on any of his ill-fated werewolf missions.

Eventually, they stumble to the bedroom and undress drunkenly, throwing clothes around as if in a sex-induced craze, but there’s none of that hateful, violent lust they acted on the last time. Sirius falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow while Remus lies there for a little while, mitigating the spinning he experiences with a foot strategically placed on the floor. He’s blank, neither happy nor unhappy, barely there at all, which is definitely in favour of the whole drinking habit.

In the morning, they’re rudely awakened by someone calling their fireplace. It must have been going for a while, because when Remus unsticks himself from his pillow, Sirius is already dragging himself out of bed.

“Fuck, I’m coming, I’m coming.”

It’s Frank Longbottom. Remus catches him on the tail end of whatever message he had, which is apparently very urgent.

“Ugh.” Sirius rubs his face. He’s the epitome of a rough awakening, complete with hair sticking up every which way. “Just hold on a tad, I’ll get dressed and throw back a potion. Bloody hell.”

He shuffles away to the bathroom and Frank’s eyes land on Remus, who is wrapped in a sheet, because he couldn’t find any trousers in his haste.

“Sorry,” Franks says sheepishly, trying not to look at Remus’ scarred shoulders but looking at them anyway. “I have to whisk him away. We’ve spotted a few suspicious individuals at one of the key spots.”

“No, I get it.” Remus shuffles from one foot to the other and decides he doesn’t care how this looks. Anyone with a functioning set of eyeballs must have noticed it already anyway. He imagines saying, _Yes, we’re lovers, do you have a problem with that, Frank?_ “Yeah,” he says instead. “Er--do you want a cuppa?”

“Erm, no, thanks. We’ll be going. Ah,” he exclaims once Sirius makes his entrance, only slightly less bedraggled, possibly hangover-free, but still shirty as hell. “There he is. Cheers, Lupin.”

Sirius stomps his way out and Remus doesn’t see him until the evening, when the summons comes for an impromptu Order meeting. Apparently, Dorcas Meadowes is dead. Apparently, Voldemort killed her himself. Apparently, Sirius and Frank caught the vanguard of that attack and lessened the collateral damage, but they weren’t able to save Dorcas and the two Muggles that happened to be on site. Apparently, the funeral is in two days, but it will be closed-coffin because of the damage to the body.

The terror Remus feels is an all-encompassing wave that renders him incoherent. It’s a close hit--he sat with Dorcas in Arithmancy and they always shared notes, and in the seventh year they went to the Yule Ball together with Sirius and Marlene, disguised as a double date, and now--they were both gone. It might just as well have been Sirius and him. It might just as well be his closed-casket funeral, or Sirius’, his handsome face mangled beyond recognition with magical fire or conjured acid.

At the funeral, he’s in the second row, behind Dorcas’ family. Sirius stands next to him, still like a statue save for a muscle twitching in his cheek. James and Lily are to their right, polyjuiced as red-headed Prewett cousins. Little Harry sleeps in James’ arms, the minister is droning on about the eternal value of good deeds, and Remus is certain that the only thing going through everyone’s heads is that this would be a brilliant time for the enemy to attack. There’s just so many of them gathered conveniently in one place, all set up in neat little rows. There must be a wand in every sleeve, fingers twitching at the ready in every pew, secret rendez-vous points whispered into ears pale with fear.

He’s supposed to be clever, one of the brightest in his year, but it only hits him then: they’re being led like lambs to the slaughter. It’s like ritual sacrifice at a pagan altar, a conflagration at the ramparts. They’re barely twenty-one. Twenty-one! He’s only been decision-making and aware for about a dozen of that! It’s like those black-and-white films his father used to watch about the Second World War, starring miserable, horrified people that Remus thought with surprise looked _just like us_, and, guess what, it is them now.

The Order’s wake is held after the funeral and is also the last outing the Potters are apparently allowed to attend, which is depressing in its own right. Remus spends most of the evening with Lily, attempting to keep her spirits up and, somewhat pathetically, get his fill of her before they take her away. She’s bravely attempting not to cry and her face is frozen in a pinched expression reminiscent of her sister Petunia. Remus suspects his own is not that far off considering how much effort it takes not to break down and weep dramatically like a character in a Greek play.

Sirius has been drinking steadily all day and he’s at the point where he appears deceptively stable and almost upbeat despite being three sheets to the wind. He’s talking to James about mundane things like Quidditch and the fucking weather and Remus keeps glancing at him, anticipating a catastrophe, which is why he manages to miss the trouble he’s walking into himself.

He goes to the kitchen to refill his and Lily’s drinks and he hears someone walk in behind him.

“Hi, Remus,” says Benjy, opening the fridge to get something out of it. “You seem to be doing remarkably well considering the occasion.”

Remus takes it as a compliment first, and wants to say _thank you_ as a reflex, but then he sees movement out of the corner of his eye.

“Hi, Lupin.” It’s Podmore. The temperature in the kitchen rapidly drops. Remus tries not to be too obvious about looking for an exit, but his nervous smile finally falters.

“You know, we’ve been doing some thinking,” Benjy says, advancing slightly. “And we’ve come to the conclusion that you knew both Marlene and Dorcas quite well.”

“I think he dated Dorcas at school,” says Sturgis and Remus shakes his head but doesn’t deign to explain what the arrangement actually was.

“Excuse me,” he says instead but Benjy steps in his way. He’s shorter than Remus but sturdy--he used to be a Beater and he once broke Sirius’ arm in a match. The pleasant smile on his face is disquieting and Remus recognizes it for what it is--a showing of teeth.

“Anyway,” Benjy continues. “There were always rumours abound about you at school and it wasn’t very difficult putting two and two together.”

Remus freezes for a second, but then--he’s always expected it one way or another, but even so he’s unpleasantly surprised at Benjy expressing that particular sentiment. He’s somehow always expected his Order mates to be better than that, but he’s old enough to understand that prejudice is not a matter of being sorted into a particular House.

He sighs and looks Benjy in the eye.

“Could you just say what you’ve obviously come here to say and then we can go back and pretend this never happened and mourn Dorcas like she deserves?”

Benjy’s eyes narrow at him and he thinks _you fucking arsehole, I used to help you with Ancient Runes because you were absolutely pants at it, and now here we are_.

“Long story short, we do have a few concerns about your loyalty, Lupin,” Podmore says, which is so ridiculous in the grand scheme of things that Remus can’t resist rolling his eyes. “Seeing as your brethren are all but--”

Sturgis is so engrossed in spouting his accusations that he completely misses someone coming up to the kitchen door. It’s Sirius, face set in a terrifying grimace, color high in his cheeks. Remus knows that expression: it’s Sirius ready to blow a fuse and laugh in the wake of the havoc he wreaks.

“Well, pardon me, Sturgis,” he says, in his ridiculously posh accent, voice icy, and Sturgis breaks off, eyes going wide. “But I couldn’t help but overhear you saying some things that I just wish I did not hear correctly. And mayhaps I have, so could you please just make it perfectly fucking clear for me?”

“There’s no need--” Remus says, raising a hand to stop Sirius from escalating this into a full-on disaster, but Sturgis doesn’t have the same qualms.

“You could actually confirm this one thing for me, Black,” he all but spits at Sirius, “because I’ve got a tiny suspicion that your mate here is a bloody werewolf and is spying--”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish that sentence, because Sirius’ fist flies out and catches him in the face. Sturgis’ head bounces off of the cupboard with a sickening crack and within a second Remus and Benjy are attempting to detach a raging Sirius from Sturgis, there’s a lot of yelling and crashing as mugs and glasses rain down from the abused cupboard, then Sirius’ flailing fist punches Frank in the nose, raining blood on the floor, and Sturgis swears vengeance and leaps at Sirius the moment he is released by the others, which is when Lily finally breaks down crying and Neville starts wailing to keep her company.

There’s so much damage and commotion that eventually no one wants to know what was exactly at the root of it--they probably assume it’s fear and paranoia and helplessness, which it was, actually, beside some good old-fashioned prejudice. The Potters drag Remus and Sirius home with them and Lily heals Sirius’ scrapes, red-eyed and sniffling, while James and Remus feed Harry and put him to sleep, and then they share a spliff silently in the kitchen that any day now will stop being their kitchen because they have to move somewhere else to keep a fucking maniac from murdering their one-year-old son. Peter’s not with them because he had to leave the wake earlier, which only adds to the feeling of an utter deconstruction of their lives, and their silent vigil feels like a wake for something other than Dorcas’ horrible and unnecessary death.

They get home at dawn and Remus is so emotionally exhausted from all the death and the fighting and the goodbyes that he barely registers anything, let alone makes any plans for damage control. Before he’s able to beg to stay and track the spy in order to prove his innocence, Dumbledore somehow catches a whiff of what has happened and sends him a new assignment, claiming that it’s for his safety and _to let tempers cool._ The assignment is on the Isle of Man. With a werewolf pack that is in frequent contact with Greyback’s.

He’s staring at the coded letter in despair and disbelief when Sirius comes in, toweling off his hair.

“What the hell even was that yesterday?” He sounds incredulous, like he wasn’t the one to come in and pummel a man so hard a cupboard flew off the wall. “I told you fucking Podmore deserves a good punch in his--”

“Oh, you made that perfectly clear.” Remus looks up from the letter. Something flares up in him, and if this is what Sirius feels like when his temper gets one over him, it’s quite pleasant in a terrifying sort of way. “Didn’t it appear to you that he could have targeted me because we’ve been tailing him the last two weeks?”

“What?” Sirius scoffs. “No, he’s obviously a prejudiced little prick, isn’t he? Anyway, you told me yourself that he’s so completely oblivious--”

“That, too, but would you agree with me that adding a punch-up to that wake was a little unnecessary?”

Sirius blinks at him, slowly, and lays the towel aside. There are circles under his eyes and his face is blotchy like he’s just had a good cry under the shower, but it must be the drinking or the hot water or probably both.

“I was only protecting you,” he says. “All that shite that he was saying--”

“Well, I don’t need you to protect me, do I?”

“Of course you don’t, but I was there and I couldn’t just let him get away with throwing accusations around like that!”

“You said the same thing yourself,” Remus reminds him. It’s like he’s in a car that is rapidly speeding towards another vehicle head on, and there’s only one lane, so there’s nowhere to run, but he’s speeding anyways. “Not four days ago. You said it might just as well be me.”

“I did not mean that, Moony, you know that.”

“Well, on some level you must have, because otherwise why would you ever _think_ that?”

“I thought we were over that.”

“I think you can understand why this is something extremely disconcerting to me, can’t you?”

Sirius sits down on the armrest of the sofa.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” he admits. “I know that. But those blokes--they were trying to get a jump on you, Remus, that’s really serious. We should be having each other’s backs and they are--”

“Doing the same thing we are, Padfoot. Trying to find the spy in our midst however way they can.”

“An amazing way they’ve found to go about that. You should _never_ be subjected to shite like that, and I wanted to protect you from--”

Remus closes his eyes, because he’s afraid that if he sees that dumb, pitiful expression on Sirius’ face again he’s going to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, or maybe punch him for good measure. Only he knows punching Sirius doesn’t necessarily make him shut up.

“You don’t have to protect me,” he says, his voice rising. “How can I get that through to that bloody thick skull of yours? You don’t! I need to know how to protect myself, because you won’t always be there, for one! And I need to be my own person, for another!”

It’s a mirror image of his earlier row with Sirius. He can see it sinking in on Sirius’ face--his eyebrows furrowing, eyes widening in surprise and disappointment--and he desperately wants to backtrack and rephrase, but there’s no way to do that now that those words have been uttered.

“What do you mean I won’t always be there?” Sirius says and it’s clear he’s hurt. He might just as well be bleeding from an open wound. “I will. I will always--like I told you back in seventh year, remember, if I only _can_, I will be there for you, so what the hell are you saying here, Moony?”

“Really, Sirius? People have been dropping like flies, haven’t you noticed? We both might be dead tomorrow, who’s to say? And they are already suspecting me of being the spy, and while that’s way off the bloody mark, I _have_ been hiding something from them, haven’t I? I _am_ a Dark Creature and they _will_ target me first, like they proved yesterday, and you--you will be off somewhere fighting or protecting the Potters or--or you will believe it eventually, that it is me, because of the things I am _forced_ to do--”

He cuts off abruptly as he sees something shining on Sirius’ cheek. It’s a tear: Sirius is sitting there silently, eyes wide open and unblinking, crying.

“Padfoot,” he says, strangely taken aback.

“Do you really believe that?” Sirius asks and then promptly answers himself. “Yeah, you’ve got to believe it if you’re saying it. You don’t ever say things you don’t believe, do you? That’s one of the things I’ve always admired about you. Which brings me to the conclusion that you _do_ believe that I doubt you and that we will not make it together--”

“I’ve never said that exactly,” Remus says, though he knows it’s not a hundred percent true.

“Maybe not in so many words, but you have apparently come to that conclusion,” Sirius says, getting up slowly. “Well, what I can say other than that maybe I should free you from the burden of my presence, then, if you don’t need me and I don’t trust you and it’s going to fall apart anyway.”

Remus is dumbfounded. Out of all the possible outcomes, he did not expect this conversation to end like this, but here it is, it’s happening right before his eyes, Sirius turning away from him like he’s always kind of expected him to do, eventually. He shakes his head, attempting to get back to a more acceptable reality, but it doesn’t seem to do the trick.

“I am leaving,” he says eventually, picking up the letter and crumpling it in his fist. “Anyway. I’m leaving. I’ve got an assignment--I don’t know when I’ll be back--”

“You know,” Sirius turns on his heel and looks at him one last time. “I don’t believe you’re the spy, but you’re definitely a miserable human being. Fuck! I can’t believe this!”

Sirius walks into the bedroom and Remus can hear him raving to himself and slamming drawers but he just keeps standing there like a mannequin, unable to move or talk or think. Then the moment is over anyway as Sirius Disapparates with a loud _pop!_ and Remus is suddenly and unbearably alone in the flat. The window is open and the sounds of the Prince of Wales Road floating inside ground him in the horrifying reality where they have just apparently broken up and he needs to pack in a way that will both be reasonable for an indefinite amount of team spent in the wild and acceptable to Manx werewolves, because his portkey is at six. He has no idea how to do that. He has no idea how to go on, actually. If dramatic weeping is still an option, he’ll take it.

He sits on the sofa in a stupor for two hours and then something just switches into autopilot and he gets up, makes sandwiches, brews tea, shaves, packs. Sirius is gone. He might not come back. Or they might miss one another. It’s not something he has influence over at the moment, so he just gets ready and leaves at six in the afternoon, like Dumbledore ordered him to.

It stays with him, what Sirius said about him being a miserable human being. Maybe it’s true. Maybe that’s why he can subject himself to the misery and debasement at the hands of the pack. His ideas of running away for a bit and sending an owl or even a coded postcard to Sirius do not ever become reality, mostly because he’s very closely watched, but also because he expects Sirius to make the first move, like he’s always done, despite it being moot and naive and childish, because Sirius can’t reach him anyway. Shivering with cold at night, wrapped only in his coat, he imagines the roar of the motorcycle coming to get him, Sirius jumping off in his leather jacket, his hair whipping in the wind.

It doesn’t happen. Instead, one day he hears a few familiar notes carried to him on the wind. It’s a wailing electrical guitar, then a beat he would recognize in his sleep. Someone is listening to _Since I’ve Been Loving You_, Sirius’ favourite Led Zeppelin song, in a trailer on a nearby hill and all of a sudden it’s as if he’s sliding down Sirius’ body in bed and kissing the groove in the juncture of his hip and leg, since most of the memories he has related to this song are erotic or at least highly sensual. He misses Sirius so fiercely it hurts somewhere underneath his ribs, and doesn’t yet know that this kind of ghostly revisitation of his kinder past is often going to be his share in the coming years.

Dumbledore finally calls him back with a Patronus messenger. There’s a quick, mostly meaningless debrief--because he’s apparently a lousy spy and an even lousier agent--and he’s rushing back to Kentish Town hoping against reason that everything is going to be okay once he walks in. It’s not: his suitcase is in the hall, packed to the brim with his transfigured things: clothes, books, records. Sirius is not in.

This should teach him not to delude himself, really. He takes the suitcase and Apparates to Wales. There’s a certain amount of bravery in not succumbing to sobbing until he’s lying in his childhood bed in his childhood room, after his father has put out all the lights and gone to sleep on the other side of the wall. His Mum would be so gravely disappointed at him failing at his adult life if she were still around; as it is, he doesn’t want anyone to know, but there’s hardly anyone to tell now, with Sirius resentful and James and Lily in hiding and Peter Merlin knows where and half of his closer acquaintances dead or gone. The day after, he puts on Sirius’ favourite records out of those he owns, as if he’s trying to banish his spirit from them, and his father walks in on him kneeling in his scattered things with _Low_ in the background. They sit together in silence for an hour or so, as if they are sharing the misery.

Remus is certain Dad knows about Sirius--he once walked in on them coming out of the shower when they were visiting; dripping wet, Sirius naked to the waist, long-haired, chiseled, the very epitome of male beauty, so bloody obvious--but he doesn’t say anything and for once Remus is grateful for the omission.

Late in the autumn, he goes back to London for a briefing and almost walks into Sirius leaving the safehouse. Sirius stops dead in his tracks, as if he’s seen a ghost. He doesn’t look very alive himself: his eyes are sunken and bloodshot, face blotchy and strangely still for someone so expressive.

They eye each other for a moment, and then Sirius opens the doors for him in a weirdly gallant gesture. His movements are sharp and measured like he’s conserving his energy and it reminds Remus of something he’s seen before but he can’t put his finger on it.

“Go in,” Sirius says hoarsely. His knuckles are scabbed over and there’s a crookedly sewn burned out hole in his jacket, just over his heart. “He’s waiting.”

“Padfoot,” Remus says, though he’s probably not going to find the words just like that, on the street, completely taken aback.

“I need to go and kill someone,” Sirius says, not looking at Remus. He doesn’t seem resentful, but haunted and resigned to his fate, which is such an un-Sirius state that Remus wants to take pity on him despite the rejection and the cold shoulder he’s getting now. “See you.”

He Disapparates with a crack before Remus gets anything else out. A week later, the Potters are dead and it’s really easy to draw certain conclusions, to pronounce a particular verdict. The news has him retching into the toilet bowl and babbling about secrets and mental illness and Black blood until Dad feeds him a calming potion and he can be seated on the sofa and given tea. The potion removes the essential feeling of despair but not the root of it which goes into his very core and tears it into little bits. He thought he died once already when he left and Sirius packed his things and left them in the hall like rubbish. He used to think he was in hell this whole time, but he was wrong, because this is way worse. It’s what he thinks the phrase _dying of love_ means. He still has love for all of them but now it doesn’t have anywhere to go. He’s like a broken socket spraying flickers and electrocuting anyone stupid enough to come close.

Dumbledore gets him out of the spotlight, which means the Aurors question him only once and fleetingly, but which has the additional effect of not being hailed a hero. It’s a benefit, really: he let his friends die, he let the man he loved unravel and betray them and kill one of them, what is he supposed to be hailed for, really? He’s not even fit to take care of Harry, so it feels that in more ways than one his life has come to a head, like he’s finally reached that doomed destination everything has been propelling him to. It’s a denouement and he can now start anew.

When he tells Dad he wants to leave, he looks sad but not overtly surprised.

“You should go,” he says and in his face Remus can suddenly see how he’s going to look in twenty years or so: grey, lined and a little worse for wear, but durable and lasting. “You--we should have gone when we had the chance, back when you were little and we discussed it with your mother--what with my work situation and the regulations… But we wanted to give you an education, so we stayed.” His father swallows and looks at Remus with more feeling than he can remember in the last dozen years. “You’re so smart, Remus. You can be anyone, do _anything_. Just not here. Not in this bloody country.”

“Dad--”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Dad. You couldn’t have known--” He swallows and won’t say it out loud. If it’s not named, maybe it will fade into obscurity and leave him be. Although that is just naive, and Remus isn’t that anymore.

2.

The first thing Sirius does when he’s free--or reasonably beyond the reach of his pursuers for the moment--is roll around in the grass. He hasn’t seen or smelled grass in years, and it’s the best thing ever, all green and springy and fresh and living and he wants to absorb some of it into his cold, withered body. He gets so enthusiastic about it that he tumbles down a hill and falls into a hole, but that hole turns out to contain a startled rabbit, so there’s his silver lining.

After he’s feasted on it and drunk himself full from a creek nearby he lies back against the grass and changes back into a man to to see the sky in the human colour range. This, unfortunately, has the side effect of human thoughts and memories coming back in full swing: Harry, James, Lily, death, Peter, Remus, betrayal, the war over, family lost. It’s like a period Muggle novel with a tragic, ridiculous ending, this refresher of his fucked up life, but he laughs in spite of it, tears trickling down his cheeks, clouds drifting unperturbed overhead. They’ve thrown him into Azkaban for twelve years and he’s still here, he’s alive and kicking, like the bloody Count of Monte Cristo, and now he’s going to make them all pay.

He’s a little shaky still on who exactly should pay for what, but he knows one thing: fucking _Wormtail_ is a danger to Harry and he wants to rip him apart with his bare hands, so he makes his way south to Little Whinging, then to Hogwarts, fucks things up all year, loses Peter, meets Moony, and escapes by the skin of his teeth.

Where does one go when they’re a wanted criminal from a country that has extradition agreements throughout Europe? After a brief stint in the Caucasus, which he hasn’t taken a terrible liking to, he recalls that the Blacks used to have a beach house on the Madagascar back in ye olden days when it was still allowed to keep slaves. It’s a bad idea to look for the house itself, of course, since it could be watched by the MLE, so he makes his way to the interior of the island. There is a magical community there that reeks of Pureblood snobbery so much he sneaks into one of the houses and steals from it with a sense of vindication. As he’s standing over the numerous possessions gathered in the master wardrobe, he finds he no longer remembers what his essentials are: robes? denims? shirts? What goes with what? Is any of this in fashion or is he going to look like his grandfather Pollux?

Eventually, he leaves with a bunch of t-shirts, some robes and pants, two pairs of mismatched socks, a purse, a razor and a wand. The wand isn’t a very good match for him, but it suffices, and the money he’s appropriated lets him rent a bungalow-slash-shack deep in the interior and get something to eat that isn’t the local rodents. Buckbeak appreciates the change in the diet too.

No longer running for his life or fighting for survival leaves him with a lot of time. He writes to Harry, a lot, and some of those letters are so long and rambling and weird that he either rewrites them from scratch or leaves them in his own confidence, as building blocks for some dwelling-on-things, which is his other major enterprise. He sits on the porch of his run-down bungalow, feet on the railing, listening to the rain come down on the jungle and tries to reconstruct what he knew and believed about the world before October 31, 1981. Things come back to him incrementally, sometimes more, sometimes less, and with no discernible pattern. Some just pop into his head, like one of the charms they used for the Map, others he painstakingly recovers by connotation with something, like the deaths of Order members in 1981. There are some that don’t come back at all, leaving gaps in his mind where he’s sure something should be.

Not surprisingly, his strongest memories are the ones he’s managed to keep hold of during his incarceration. When the Dementors were gone to plague some other poor soul, he was often able to drag up the plot of a novel he liked or--or a song, like The Doors' _The End_, which he knew by heart and would often play in his mind as a treat to himself. _The End_ came with an early memory of listening to it for the first time in his room on his charmed turntable, shivers running down his spine, breath held out of reverence, as well as a later one, of watching that Vietnam war film with Remus and then listening to the record while shagging on the living room carpet.

Remus is one of those touchstones, too. Even in the toughest of times, when he was being hollowed out like a dying tree, everything that made him Sirius slowly evaporating in the chilly air of his cell--he could hold on to Remus' image, vague as it was. He was tall and lanky and scarred, had funny toes and cold hands and warm eyes and a voice that could both soothe and command and cut like a knife. Sometimes, Sirius could not remember anything more than that, not even his name or the features of his face, and back in the Shrieking Shack he was actually surprised to hear Remus speak with a Welsh accent.

On his worse days, he explores the island as Padfoot, chasing the exotic animals about and interacting with the local people. They’re not as afraid of him as the British are of the Grim, so they feed him scraps and talk to him in French, amazed that the dog keeps tilting his head or nodding as if he understands. The vibrant nature and the kindness of strangers heals that part of him that’s been raging and howling against the injustice of it all, deafening everything else, and lets other facets come to the surface, like his curiosity about the world, his restlessness, his taste for the finer things in life. And his carnality, locked away for the past thirteen years.

He rediscovers it bit by bit, scrubbing himself clean in a pond in the forest and noticing how concave his chest has become, washing and cutting his hair from the matted mass it’s become, licking his fingers after eating some local cuisine, watching people playing and swimming on the beach. He used to like to eat and drink and smoke and make sure he looks good. He used to lust after handsome men and beautiful women. He used to attract attention, eyes following him wherever he went. He used to be fit. It’s difficult to believe now as he looks at his skull-like reflection in the water, with the skin sunburnt where it was exposed to the sun and grey where it wasn’t, hair dull and crookedly shorn. He’s lost most of the muscle mass across the shoulders and the chest, his hips jut out sickly, legs resembling toothpicks, feet ridiculously big in comparison with the calves and thighs.

He longs to recover some of those sensual experiences too--the feel of tight trousers on his legs, the smell of his leather jacket when he put it on in the morning, Remus’ hands in his hair, clasping, tugging, the first cigarette of the day down his lungs. If he could bring it back somehow, maybe he could remember, so on his next venture into town as Padfoot he steals a pack of cigarettes from a man napping in the sun and smokes all of them at night in his bungalow. The insects are loud in the trees and the stars are more vivid than ever in London and on his fifth cigarette he remembers kissing Moony in the summer before their seventh year.

It comes back crystal clear and sharp like a knife. Moony crept into his room way after midnight, like a thief. Sirius hadn’t been sleeping, but he feigned being woken up when he heard footsteps creaking on the uneven hardwood floor of the guest-room-cum-his-room. _Whozzat_?--_It’s me_, Moony whispered. He was just a shape against the ambient light coming in from the outside: a mop of hair at the top of a thin body, already taller than Sirius by about two inches. Sirius knew that body and its nightmare twin quite well by that time, but he felt an unexpected electric charge in the air and raised himself expectantly on his elbows. _What are you doing here_? he asked, trying to put a name to it despite the laughable obviousness of it, because why would a seventeen-year-old steal into somebody’s bedroom for anything other than that.

_Just wanted to talk to you_, Moony said, or something equally unassuming, and then the mattress dipped under his knee as he leaned over Sirius in bed. Sirius remembers himself thinking _now or never_, thought now he’s fairly sure it was inevitable anyway. Remus kissed him then, first a press of dry lips and a hand on his shoulder, then, emboldened, straddling him and sliding his tongue into Sirius’ mouth, and it redefined his fucking life; it wasn’t his first kiss, it wasn’t even the best kiss he’s ever had, by far, since they were both fairly inexperienced back then and there was altogether too much saliva, but it was more than snogging or whatever else you’d call it. It was an opening to the real life that’s been waiting for Sirius outside of the walls of his house and the school, the life that ended with exile to that freezing hell and his best friends murdered and one of them setting him up and the love of his life abandoning him.

He flicks the cigarette butt into the darkness and straightens with a thud of his feet hitting the wooden deck. That ending was temporary, it must have been. He’s still here after all. Harry is still out there, the best thing to come out of all of them. Remus is--

Repentant, if he recalls correctly. _As he should be_, he thinks, because if Remus ever got sent to Azkaban, Sirius would be ripping bars from the windows with his fucking teeth. How the fuck could he have left Sirius there and swallowed all that shite about Sirius betraying _James_ of all people. How could have all of his friends and acquaintances, for that matter, fucking _bought_ that. It goes against the very core of who he is and being so misjudged is a painful offense in itself, especially now that he’s free and will probably be meeting some of them sooner or later.

He’s still chewing that over a few days later, when a pigeon arrives to his bungalow. He’s a little suspicious but then he’s been sending parrots to Harry, so why not. He gives the pigeon some breadcrumbs and reads the letter attached to its leg.

_Mr. P.,_

_Mr. M. has put considerable effort into discerning your location so if you could do him the favour of reading this message, he would be much obliged._

_He would like to uphold everything he has said in the place of your last meeting, which is quite rife with memories. That, along with some other factors, has made him regret believing certain things that he was made to believe and he would very much like to possibly see Mr. P again, if the Fates allow, of course._

_Yours,_

_Mr. M._

Sirius reads it greedily at least five times before he can put it down. At the bottom, there is an address to a PO box in London, which makes sense, which is reasonable and cautious just like Moony himself. It’s his handwriting and his phrasing. What is completely unlike him is reaching out first with this olive branch, at least according to Sirius’ seriously punctured memory.

Still, his first instinct is to ask for a location and jump onto Buckbeak to swoop in on Remus like the deranged sunburnt pillock he is. That would make for an extraordinary reunion, certainly, Remus’ eyes huge and alarmed, his cardigan-clad frame hunching over slightly to level with Sirius, _Padfoot, have you gone spare?_, ever the stiff-lipped Briton. He remembers suddenly that Andromeda doubted Sirius’ taste in partners, implying that Remus was too subdued and wobbly, to which Sirius responded with laughter. Remus was the strongest person he’d known ever. Remus is the strongest.

He writes back to Remus. It’s not as clear-cut as it sounds, of course, as he has to go through many versions of the message to make sure it’s not overeager or too cold or too rambling. He basically promises to meet Remus as soon as he can and hints at forgiveness even though he’s not sure it’s entirely in store yet, what with the twelve years in a miserably cold prison cell with human contact limited to a few Death Eaters once a month or so. Then he summons a parrot and charms it to deliver the letter to London.

As he watches it fly away, it dawns on him that the Remus that he’s trying to reach probably doesn’t exist anymore. They hardly had time to talk in the Shack, which means that Remus might as well have become a firefighter, married a Scottish woman, divorced her and moved to Norway in the meantime, who the fuck even knows. It’s not like he can ask Dumbledore for a recap of what’s been going on with Remus for the past thirteen years. He wonders who else from the Order of the Phoenix is still around and suddenly the name _Sturgis Podmore_ pops into his mind, but he doesn’t really know why. Did they use to be mates? Did he, like, have weird facial hair? Did Sirius bum fags off of him every time they met? No idea. Which brings him to: how the hell can they reconnect if Remus can now be whomever and Sirius himself is like a sieve, more holes than matter? But it’s too late, the parrot has flown away into the thick canopy of the trees and further away.

He moves to Réunion, which is rocky, beautiful and wild and spends a long time just traipsing around with Buckbeak in the mountainous interior, sleeping under trees or in ravines, eating whatever they can find, bathing in creeks. There’s a great peace to it that has a lot to do with not speaking to anyone and not being required to deliver anything, just melding into whatever landscape he happens to be in. Maybe he could even become that, like a bearded wild man in the hills that tourists hear about from the locals and try to spot on their hikes, maybe he could never come back at all, just fall off the face of the earth.

They come across a family one day and Sirius turns quickly into Padfoot to draw their attention away from the bush where Buckbeak is crouching. The little girl begs her father to take the dog in, _Pa, it looks terribly neglected, we could feed it and wash it and it probably would turn out to be a really nice dog_, and the father’s face scrunches up in consideration. Padfoot quickly makes himself scarce. An escaped convict appearing in your daughter’s bedroom in the middle of the night is a nightmare scenario, even if the promise of sandwiches is so enticing Padfoot’s muzzle waters. The girl was a few years younger than Harry, but still Sirius feels the pangs of his conscience, and settles down to write his godson in the evening.

When he learns what’s been troubling Harry he packs up his meager belongings and flies back to Scotland. It’s miserable at this time of the year, so he keeps a fire burning at all times, masked with a Disillusionment charm; fortunately, striking a flame with his fingers is the one magical skill that has never left him, and it let him keep warm in his freezing prison cell too. He transfigures a few rocks and tree stumps into furniture but his stolen wand is wonky and it all rather looks like the work of a deranged carpenter.

Time seems to flow differently here, maybe because Hogsmeade and the Forest are a painful refresher of his school years. Everyday, things come back in bits and pieces: Transfiguration exams. James’ and his epic hungover after Marlene’s birthday party. Pete’s Magnificent Three Hours after he slipped in Potions class and inhaled some of Felix Felicis ingredients. Remus’ pale naked bum in the woods after he’d slipped away from them just before daybreak. The more he regains, the more difficult he finds disengaging from it and on some nights he lies frustratingly awake in his crooked camp bed, a disordered, purposeless loop of his youthful years flashing before his eyes.

One night, he falls asleep only before dawn and has his first erotic dream in a dozen or so years, starring Remus Lupin in a turtleneck and flared trousers that fantastically compliment his long legs. In the dream, he ambushes Remus in a bathroom at some sort of a social gathering, pushes him onto a cupboard and proceeds to enthusiastically suck and tug him off, and when he wakes up he’s aware of two things: one, he’s not sure if that was a fantasy or a memory, and two, he actually has an erection.

He laughs because it makes him feel more like a human being than anything in the past weeks, but then it suddenly hits him: they used to have an intense carnal relationship, Moony and he, that was consummated on a creaking bed in his room at the Potters’ and continued throughout their seventh year at school and into their adult lives, of course, sure, and maybe he’s been aware of that the whole time, but not to this extent. He wants to see Remus, because the flame evidently has not been extinguished, but he doesn’t find it entirely probable that Remus has been carrying a torch for him this whole time; it’s been so long, prison, Scottish brides, moving to Norway, et caetera. What the fuck is he going to do if Remus actually has someone, fight them? Ignore it? Forget? He’s missing both his confidence and his looks, and his mind is not a selling point either at the moment.

He eventually writes Remus after Harry visits, as seeing him always leaves Sirius in a better mood. Any kind of contact seems risky but Remus has suggested it himself and Sirius is, frankly, starved for interactions other than with Buckbeak or teenagers.

It’s overwhelming and unreal when Remus actually comes. He knocks on the rock at the entrance to the cave like it’s a door and has a tentative smile on his face as he looks Sirius up and down.

“Hi,” he says. “May I--may I come in?”

“Uh. Yeah. I mean, come on in. I’ve invited you after all.”

Remus takes a few steps inside. He’s so tall he needs to duck a little and he moves like he’s afraid to break something, his eyes taking in Sirius’ shabby shelter. Sirius is suddenly terribly self-conscious and rubs his hands against his tattered jeans.

“I brought you something,” Remus says, breaking the silence, and he pulls out a few jars from his bag. “I thought you might have trouble getting something to eat and I--I’m sorry, I don’t have much, but I can get you more of course. These are--pickles and some jam.”

Sirius comes closer, moved, and takes the jars, piling them awkwardly in his arms.

“Thank you. Yeah, it’s not that easy at this time of the year. So--thanks so much. Have a seat.” He gestures to one of the transfigured chairs near the fire and sets the jars behind some rocks. “Bucky is out flying, if. If you want to know. He’s been keeping me company but he’s not terribly talkative, unfortunately.”

Remus snorts and sits down. Firelight glints off the grey in his hair and there are now visible grooves on his forehead and both sides of his mouth, but his face is so, so familiar that something wells up in Sirius and comes up as a lump in his throat.

“How are you doing, Sirius?” Remus asks and Sirius shrugs. He’s been better, really. He’s constantly pushing his fear of being captured to the back of his mind. His magic is acting up, too.

“What about you?” He leans closer, hungry for anything Remus is willing to give him. “Tell me something about you. What’s been going on with you?”

“Nothing much, I’m afraid. I’ve been doing some editing and translating work. It’s not terribly exciting, but it pays.”

“Is that--what you’ve been doing this whole time--or--”

“I left,” Remus says, not looking at him. “Back then. I wasn’t around for most of the time.”

“Well, where did you go?”

“Er, Germany, then farther east. Poland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia. It was easier to find work there. People are not as sensitive... to some subjects as around here.”

“Not as prejudiced,” Sirius says and that word sparks something in him. Prejudice.

“Yeah, you could say that. Or maybe they’re prejudiced in a different way.”

“What did you like the most?” Sirius leans over, aware that he’s probably almost manic with his eagerness to know.

“The mountains,” Remus replies with barely any deliberation. “They have really nice mountains on the mainland. The Alps and the Carpathians. But I missed Wales anyway.”

“Do you live there now? In Wales?”

“No, I live in Yorkshire. I’m renting a cottage there. It’s in the middle of nowhere but it’s cheap.”

“No wonder, it’s in Yorkshire,” Sirius says and for a second he feels like he’s twenty-one again and he’s talking to Moony in the kitchen of their flat. Oh, right, their flat. “Uh, do you know what happened to our flat?”

“Your flat,” Remus replies with a wince. “The MLE probably sold it back to the city, that’s what they do with con--uh, at least as far as I know. And your stuff is probably locked somewhere in the Ministry.”

“So you don’t have any of my things?”

“No, I’m sorry. I wasn’t even in London for it and then it didn’t really occur to me.” Remus grimaces. “I might have some of your albums. Or, the ones we bought together but you--um. Sirius.” He looks Sirius in the eye. It’s disconcerting. Very intimate. Sirius isn’t ready for it. “Do you have trouble remembering things?”

“Why would you ask?” He straightens, quite offended.

“I’ve been reading about the effects of long term confinement--”

Sirius jumps to his feet.

“So it’s like I’ve got some kind of a problem and you’ve been reading stuff on how to deal with me?”

“I’m sorry.” Remus looks up at him. “That came out wrong. I--I wanted to be ready for this and I just didn’t know what to expect. It’s just that it was so long--I can hardly believe you’re here, Sirius.”

“Neither can I, on some days.” He sits back down and looks at the fire. The lump is back, along with the annoying flashback reel, probably triggered by Moony’s voice or presence. He should probably treasure the memories and try to make sense of them, but he mostly feels sick and tired of them, because he’s just realized what a double-edged sword they are: the more he recovers, the more he realises what he’s missing.

He looks askance at Remus who’s wearing a very peculiar expression.

“And now you’re probably thinking _oh shit, I didn’t sign up for this now_, aren’t you? This isn’t what you’ve come here for. You were supposed to meet Sirius and I’m a fucking stranger. And that’s okay, you’re probably not who I remember either, and not because I might be missing some parts.”

Remus holds a hand to his mouth like he’s witnessing something terrible. _I am the source of that_, Sirius thinks with a frown. _I’ve just brought the roof down on him_. He’d been living his Sirius-free life, making pickles, reading smart books, travelling all over Europe and then Dumbledore called him back to teach at Hogwarts and Sirius jumped out like a jack-in-the-box, and now he’s not even Sirius at all, but this damaged ugly thirty-year-old who doesn’t even remember their last meeting before prison.

“What about Padfoot?” Remus asks suddenly. “May I see Padfoot?”

“Uh. Sure.” Sirius is taken aback, but he goes with it; while Padfoot is not a disguise, Sirius’ been using him as such and putting on Padfoot is akin to dressing in a cloak and hat to him.

He transforms anyway, face into a muzzle, legs into paws, and inhales the familiar Moony-smell that the man before him is emitting. It’s good; warm, musky and layered, and it makes him want to come closer to its source. When he does, Remus extends his hand and pets him on the head and neck, and Padfoot sighs happily and leans against his side. He’s looking for traces of other people in Remus’ smell, but he can’t find any, just wool and woodsmoke and--plums, for some reason. It feels strange to have Remus touch him after all this time and he’s not sure if he likes it.

After Remus leaves, Padfoot flops over and transforms into Sirius, desolate and lonely on the floor of the cave. His throat and his eyes are burning and he feels a great anger rise up in him, like a storm or a great wave. He jumps to his feet, lets out a roar and kicks one of his wonky chairs, sending it flying into the wall. It crashes into pieces so forcefully he has to shield his face from the splinters. He hasn’t felt anger like this ever since he ran away from that goddamn place, or maybe even earlier. It’s like he’s mourning something but he’s not sure what--something unfair, something so horrible it’s worth yelling and throwing things around.

His mind finally catches up to his body, supplying him with memories of Remus yelling at him, slapping him, pushing him around. That’s it, that’s why he never came for Sirius, that’s why Sirius can’t recall him from Godric’s Hollow, from his pursuit of Peter, from those long terrible weeks of sinking down into fear and hate and paranoia in the fall of 1981. It’s because he was alone and _he was alone_ because he'd suspected Moony of being the spy, for some inane reason he can’t really remember now. And Moony left him for it.

Remus doesn’t come back that winter, and Sirius doesn’t invite him again. He does, however, receive two packages with foodstuffs that he is tempted to smash against the wall in a fit of pique, but hunger prevails and he eats them instead. Other than that, he broods in his cave and talks nonsense at Buckbeak, who is definitely not thrilled by Sirius’ behaviour. It’s not a good time, especially what with everything that is going on at the school.

After the horrible Tournament finale, Dumbledore orders him to stay at Remus’ and his first instinct is, as ever, to defy it, but his gut, in its second or maybe third major appearance since prison, is telling him to go, so he packs up and goes, as much as it hurts him to part from Harry. There’s a world out there he needs to tackle; he’s been out in it for nearly two years now and he knows nothing about save for what he read in random Muggle newspapers.

He Disillusions Beaky and makes a few circles over Northwestern Yorkshire before he spots the hamlet of Cotterdale that Dumbledore pointed him to. A mile or so south from the hamlet there is a lone cottage surrounded by a small garden, difficult to notice since it’s mostly hidden by the crown of a great tree. He lands in a nearby forest and leaves Buckbeak there to fend for himself and just asks him to behave himself.

Remus is smoking on the porch when Sirius casually walks up to the cottage. Remus’ eyes go wide and the cigarette falls out of his fingers and rolls onto the deck.

“Sirius,” he says. “What the fuck?”

Somehow, this makes for a perfect welcome.

“Dumbledore sent me,” Sirius says. “There’s been--something’s happened. I’ll tell you.”

He’s halfway between the gate and the cottage. On both sides of the path, the little garden is thriving, lush and green, a little bit wild and overgrown. Remus gapes at him on the porch for a beat before he catches on.

“Ah--yes, come on in. You must be thirsty.”

He’s thirsty, hungry, dirty and a few other things, but Remus probably knows that already, he’s just being polite. Sirius enters the cottage almost reverently, brushing his fingers across the door, taking in the neat row of shoes in the small hall--there’s even a pair of wellingtons there--the coats on the hangers, the blurry mirror on the wall. His reflection is once more bearded and wild-haired. It’s a good thing he didn’t come by at night, because he could have given Remus quite a scare.

He remembers to take off his ragged coat and hang in the hall. He toes off the shoes, too, and pads into the living room. Remus is in the kitchen, putting on the kettle, so Sirius has some time to adjust. His eyes land on the shelves: there’s a whole wall of them, filled with books and records. A thrill goes through him at the thought of listening to Led Zeppelin again, though it would be a surprise if Remus turned out to own any of it, he’s never been an avid fan, mostly a bystander to Sirius’ fascination. There’s a record player on a rickety cupboard and a weird Muggle appliance next to it that Sirius can’t identify, because Muggle technology has really advanced and Sirius has fallen behind.

He’s still squinting at the device when Remus comes in with two steaming mugs and sets them on the table. Their eyes meet and it’s undeniably weird, like breaching this border of intimacy that usually has to do with visiting someone at home, but he can’t ever remember that with Remus before, because they shared a dorm for seven years and a flat for another four, but apparently there it is now.

“Have a seat,” Remus says, gesturing to the chair opposite of him. He seems quite collected, but voice shakes just the slightest bit. “What is it that you were supposed to tell me?”

Sirius sits down, takes a deep breath and recounts the events to him.

“Buggering hell,” Remus says, quite shaken. He gets up and heads to the kitchen, but seems to reconsider and turns back, looking at Sirius. “So what are we supposed to do? Just--hit up Dung and tell him that it’s happening all over again? Jesus, I’m not even sure if these people are still alive.”

“Yeah.” Sirius shrugs. “Seems so.”

His thoughts go back to Harry: it used to be such a consolation to him that at least Harry won’t have to go through what they went, but that was too much to wish for, wasn’t it.

“What about you?” Remus is saying. Sirius shakes out of his reverie. “Sirius?”

“Well, I’m still on the run.” He leans back in his seat, knees wide apart. He used to sit like that and it’s like there’s still a little bit of himself in this stance. “The old man would like me to stay here.”

“With me?” Remus asks as if he isn’t the only human being for miles.

“Yeah.” Sirius lowers his eyes. The table is peeling and spotty. Someone hasn’t been taking good care of it. “That is, if you’ll have me.”

“Uh, of course. You’re welcome to stay here. It’s quite humble, but I--sorry I did not think of it sooner--”

“No harm done. It’s, um--you could go straight to Azkaban if they caught us here. So. You know. If there’s any reason--”

He suppresses a shiver at the mention of the name of that place. Remus is staring at him with a curiously still expression and Sirius realizes that it’s dissembling and he can’t decipher it. He feels the impulse to be a brat about it but then he remembers the packages Remus sent him in the winter and the spring despite being, obviously, short on money, taking into account his threadbare clothes and the cottage--while it’s well taken care of, it is obviously run-down and in the middle of nowhere too, and what’s he been doing recently? Translating? Editing? Sirius remembers him taking on those odd jobs when they lived together and they paid terribly back then, and that has probably not changed at all.

“No, Sirius,” Remus says eventually, with a lopsided smile. “Of course you can stay. I will be glad to have you. Do you, uh, have anything with you?”

“Uh, just a bag of stuff I stole. Mostly clothes. I left it in the hall.”

“Do you want me to--” Remus wrinkles his nose. “Put it in the wash?”

“I’d rather put myself in the wash if that’s okay.”

“Sure. Let me show you around.”

It’s really awkward, but Sirius does need the refresher on human dwellings. The bathroom is here, the kitchen there, the washing machine over there, because Remus has always believed in the Muggle way of cleaning and even got Sirius to scrub their bathroom by hand, eventually. The guest bedroom upstairs is filled with old broken furniture that Remus promises to transfigure into something useful, i.e. a bed for Sirius. Remus’ bedroom is on the other side of the hall, containing a wardrobe with Remus’ old suitcase on top and a double bed that draws Sirius’ eyes to it like a magnet.

There’s nothing special about it—it’s neat, made, covered with a quilt that’s seen better days—but it makes him immensely aware that they used to sleep together. Remus is standing next to him, too, and his proximity dredges up memories of his face above Sirius’ as he’s holding Sirius down with an intense expression. He always looked focused and calm when they were fucking, like it was an exercise that required concentration but otherwise was no big deal, while Sirius was having the time of his life and letting everyone know that he was.

“What is it?” Remus asks now, in the doorway of his bedroom.

_I just remembered that you used to slap me around because I liked it_, Sirius thinks, looking up at Remus’ inquisitive expression. And it does make sense, albeit for reasons he doesn’t want to get into, even in his own mind.

He shakes his head.

“I am all over the place. Like—like a child seeing stuff for the first time, do you know? You were right, I am not remembering everything, or at least not correctly.”

Remus frowns at him and his expression is this terrible mix of pity, guilt and concern. Sirius hates it.

“I’m sorry.” Remus lifts his hand and squeezes Sirius’ shoulder encouragingly. It’s a good touch, strong and warm, and Sirius wants to lean into it but that seems far too intimate for someone he’s seen thrice in the last dozen years. “I can try to help you--remember things. Help you out.”

“Do you remember everything?” Sirius asks before he’s even aware what it’s implying.

It gets really weird for a moment. Remus gazes at him with an eerie intensity that reminds Sirius of sex again, but not only that, but also of Remus embracing him, consoling him, propping him up when he was about to fall down. He shouldn’t be expecting the same now, when they used to be together so long ago, Merlin fucking damn it, and it fell apart because he was daft and weak.

“Yeah,” Remus says, eventually, with a tell-tale wince. “What do you say you go take a bath and I’ll get dinner going?”

“Sure, sounds good,” Sirius says, his throat tight. It’s a deflection, but he accepts it. “Thanks.”

He strips, then remembers he doesn’t have a change of clothes with him, so he’ll need to ask Remus for some. There are some towels in the cupboard and he takes the ugly navy one for himself, afraid he’s going to leave streaks of dirt on the nice, cream ones. He runs the tap, rinses his face. It looks terrible, gaunt, the skin waxy, his stubble growing into an unruly, uneven beard. He’d love to shave but he’s not sure what razor he could use, and the toiletries above the washbasin don’t make much sense to him. It’s all a bit much, really, and he needs to prop himself up on the washbasin for a minute to catch his breath. Yeah, he was on the run for two years by himself, but he didn’t need to know how to be Sirius then.

There’s a knock on the door.

“Sirius? I’ve brought you a change of clothes. Do you need anything else?”

“I’d like a razor.” He clears his throat. “Thanks.”

“May I come in?”

“Yeah, sure.” He quickly ties the towel around his waist and opens the door. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Remus take stock of his concave chest, his tattoos, his stick-like arms.

“You can have this shaver,” Remus says, presenting him with a plastic Muggle instrument, “or I could charm you clean-shaven once you wash, your choice.”

“I--yeah, let’s do that. I didn’t do any charms of himself because I was afraid I’d take my head off with somebody else’s wand.”

“That’s a reasonable fear.”

Sirius’ meets Remus’ eyes and--something switches on inside of him; no, it’s softer than that, subtler. Like a wave coming over, or a breeze bringing in new weather. His pounding heart slows and so does his breathing as they stand in the narrow, steamy bathroom, and Sirius has a sudden urge to just unload everything onto this man. He looks eager to shoulder it. It seems cosmically right.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Remus says, breaking the moment. “Let me know when you’re ready for shaving.”

Remus leaves and puts on some music that Sirius only hears through the door and the walls as he slides into the hot bath. He doesn’t recognize the songs, but he’s pretty sure he used to listen to this band before. As the half-familiar, half-strange music washes over him, his foot starts jerking to the rhythm of its volition, splashing water onto the floor. It adds to the growing feeling of the irreality of the situation and makes it quite easy to believe that his disillusioned self could perhaps finally catch a break.

He scrubs himself down with the soap he finds in the dispenser, taking special care of his hard-soled, grimy feet and hands as if clean nails could somehow bring him closer to his pampered old self. Towelled off and clean, he dresses in the trousers and t-shirt that have been left for him--the fashions different from what he remembers--and they hang on him, not only too long, but also too big, because he doesn’t fill them out like he used to.

He calls Remus over for the shave and holds his breath the whole time Remus holds him by the chin and charms his beard away. Up close Remus’ hazel eyes have all these amber flecks in them. There are crow’s feet at their corners. The scars across his nose have faded a bit, but he has two new, long, ragged ones across his forehead and right cheek. Sirius hasn’t been this physically close to anyone since before the prison, except for the time he was briefly hugged by Remus or Harry, and it’s so tense and tender and weird that he emerges from the bathroom so wide-eyed and fragile that can’t handle any really serious conversation at dinner. Remus seems to sense that and he just mostly makes conversation about the music Sirius missed in the eighties, which is like a balm for his poor music-deprived soul. It’s apparently The Talking Heads on the player, so no wonder he recognized the vocals and the music despite having not heard the album itself before. It’s really good, too, perhaps even better than the last one Sirius heard.

Afterwards, Remus sets and resets his wards on the house and the perimeter as Sirius watches from the porch, chin propped up on his hands. Then Remus disappears behind the cottage and comes back out in wellingtons, carrying a huge bucket, and starts watering his garden. Sirius gapes. He’s never seen Remus keep a plant alive longer than a month and this is not only a thriving garden, it’s also yielding a crop in the form of cabbage, onions, parsley and other things he can’t identify, and not because he’s forgotten, but because he was a city boy and used to believe fruit and vegetables just spawned in their pantry at Grimmauld Place.

He can hear Remus’ knees cracking from where he’s sitting so he eventually climbs down to try and help. Remus is really patient with him which is probably a testament to his skill as a teacher. When it gets dark, they retire to the cottage and sit on the sofa. Sirius has no idea what to do, like he’s never seen a living room before, so he just sits there, soaking up the atmosphere. Remus finally takes pity on him and turns on the radio and reaches for his work. Sirius tries not to watch him too closely but he notices his hands shake slightly and he’s not making much progress in his editing.

That night he has a terrible nightmare about being stuck in an iron coffin. As he struggles against the lid, he can hear Bellatrix laughing outside as she used to in prison; that fucking maniac chortle that penetrated his waking days and his nights because they were placed in the same block, as if the Dementors organised them alphabetically, or as if someone wanted to make Sirius even more miserable. In the dream, when he finally throws the lid open, he finds himself in his cell, only somehow it’s 1981 again and he needs to warn the Potters right now, but he can’t get out, can’t get out, can’t--

“Sirius.” Remus is leaning over him, his hand on Sirius’ shoulder. “You were screaming, I--”

“Oh fuck.” Sirius sits up. He’s wet all over. It’s cold sweat. “I need to get out of here--”

“You’re okay.” Remus grabs him by both shoulders and holds him back. “You’re safe. You’re at my house. You’re not being held here. This is your bedroom.”

Sirius struggles against him, because it can’t be true, he’s in danger, James is in danger, he needs to run, but Remus’ arms are like steel, they don’t budge, even though Sirius pushes and slaps at them wildly. Eventually, he runs out of steam and just slumps forward, still panting, but slower with each exhale. Remus embraces him then, one hand on Sirius’ back, the other on the back of his neck. Sirius blinks slowly against his shoulder as the terror abates.

“Thanks.” He pulls back. His throat is parched but his eyes are wet. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Remus frowns at him. “Do you want something for sleep--”

“No. Just leave the door open. Thanks.”

Remus nods, gives him a tight smile and leaves. Sirius curls on his side. He hates this, because he hates being taken care of, for one, and because it brings back memories of his slow and inevitable break down in late 1981, for another. Something pulls at his gut, like a craving, so he gets up and pads downstairs to the kitchen for some water. It’s pitch black, so he lights his wonky wand and jumps at his own reflection in the hallway mirror. He gets some water, but it doesn’t exactly quench his thirst, and then it hits him: he used to drink. Oh, he hit the bottle like John fucking Bonham, he got pissed on a daily basis, starting at 8 am on the dot. He drank so much it’s a wonder he can now recall that year at all, Azkaban or no Azkaban. He got so shitfaced he became weird and aggressive and paranoid. It’s no wonder Remus couldn’t stand that.

He throws a look over his shoulder, but the hallway is clear, so he allows himself a quick and silent search of the kitchen cupboards, but he can’t find anything other than oil and vinegar. Remus either doesn’t drink or has hidden all liquor from Sirius, and if so, it was commendable foresight on his side.

Slightly defeated but at least guiltless, he climbs back upstairs and curls in his bed as Padfoot.

The next morning Remus makes breakfast: eggs, toast, spring onions, tomatoes. Just the sight of it makes Sirius perk up, because a world where people eat leisurely breakfast can’t be all that bad. He takes a deep breath and asks Remus to fill him in on the state of the world, so he learns amongst other things about his mother and Freddie Mercury dying, and it’s difficult to say which one hits him more, other than that Freddie hasn’t left Sirius an enormous fortune, a cursed ancestral home and at least three holiday homes in different parts of Britain and France. There’s also apparently a weird sickness targeting gay men, Princess Diana is separated from Prince Charles and the UK is colonizing the world with a music genre called Britpop. Also, Sirius has missed the last Star Wars film, several attacks by the IRA and a war in the Balkans. In short, the world has gone on without  
him.

Remus tells him he’s going into town to get groceries, which makes Sirius dig into his bag of stolen things for the last of the money he stole. Remus doesn’t want to take it, of course, and they quickly fall into their old routine of Remus pretending he doesn’t need to grow cabbage to survive and Sirius strong arming him into taking the fucking money. That, apparently, hasn’t changed at all.

Remus takes the bicycle out of the shed and waves Sirius goodbye from the gate. He’s tempted to turn into Padfoot and watch Remus go but he stays in the garden instead, which is a bad idea, because he’s suddenly gripped by an intense feeling of despair at the loss of this kind of life with Remus. Harry’s childhood, too; they could have brought him up together, maybe even in a cottage just like this, somewhere in Wales. Sirius had good memories from visiting Remus in Wales. It would have been a good life.

It’s crippling, this realization. He stumbles to the great oak tree and slumps down, sliding down with his back to the trunk. He wills his mind empty, takes measured breaths and fantasizes about a glass of whisky he could pour himself and down. Alcohol helped deal with the unacceptable facts of life, but there is still no liquor in the cottage, and moreover he feels horrible for going through Remus’ things and so gives himself a timeout on the porch.

When Remus comes back, they put away the groceries and try to work out how to contact Mundungus and the other Order members Dumbledore asked them to find. Remus goes through his letters and journals while Sirius writes Harry about his new living situation. Then it’s fish sticks for dinner—Sirius, however, attacks every dish with similar enthusiasm—and an evening spent listening to things that have come out in the nineties. Sirius takes a particular liking to Morphine and Temple of the Dog (which is somewhat expected).

He has nightmares every other night, but Remus is like a watchdog, out of his bedroom the moment he hears a scream or thrashing. They pay a visit to Dung and Sirius scares the living daylights out of him as Padfoot or, rather, the Grim. Arabella Figg feeds Padfoot cookies and lets him play with her half-Kneazle cats. They spy a little bit on Harry and then go shopping for Sirius-sized clothing at a thrift store, which lets him dress the way he used to before, because he hates the wide bootcut legs denims apparently have in the nineties. Sirius plots how to get money out of his family vault without the goblins denouncing him and Remus threatens him with violence if he ever attempts that. His memory comes back in bits and pieces, sometimes quite disjointed, faces not combining with names or dates with events, but even so, he’s still missing quite a big part of it.

Eventually, it all comes down to Sturgis Podmore.

“Funny you should ask,” Remus says once Sirius poses the eternal question. “Sturgis used to be in the Order with us. You punched him once so hard he crashed into a cupboard and snapped the door off its hinges. Porcelain rained down. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

“What?” he grimaces. They’re washing and drying the dishes after dinner and he’s gesturing with the towel. “Why would I punch--oh, he was a dick to you, wasn’t he? If so, it certainly seems like he deserved it.”

“There was more to it,” Remus says noncommittally.

“I thought you were the spy, didn’t I,” Sirius says. He’s in this particular space where things come back to him as he speaks them out. “But that’s nonsense. You were loyal. Pragmatic and cynical at times, but absolutely loyal and dependable.”

“Thank you for the compliment, even if it’s back-handed.” Remus sets aside the last plate and washes the suds off his hands. “To be frank--you weren’t making a lot of sense at the end, sometimes. I mean, you’ve always had this tendency to be overdramatic and exaggerating but this was something else. I think you did actually believe everyone was out to get you.”

“Yeah, but you?” Sirius throws the rag onto the drier. “No wonder you left me.”

The second that sentence leaves his mouth, he’s sure he’s overstepped, but Remus just shakes his head slowly, gaze fixed on Sirius’ face.

“I didn’t, Padfoot. You were the one who left.”

“What?” Sirius is getting a little hot under the collar. “That can’t be bloody right.”

“But it is,” Remus replies slowly, as if to a child, which usually means that he’s getting annoyed. “You _left_ and I had to get out of London, and I learned about everything that happened from an owl from _Dumbledore_\--”

“That’s not possible. You left me because I thought you were the spy and I was drinking--”

“All true, but you were the one to actually take that step. What?” He snaps at Sirius who is still gaping at him, uncomprehending. “Do you think I would be lying to you about something like that?”

“You can tell me whatever you want, there’s still a hole the size of Yorkshire in my fucking memory,” Sirius fires back and Remus goes pale with fury.

“I never lied to you over the course of our relationship. Ever! And I would never lie about something of this caliber!”

“I’m pretty sure you lied sometimes.” Sirius advances, hands on his hips. “Like, to make me feel better or to make me shut up.”

“Maybe so, but those were little things,” Remus says, his eyes huge in his tight, miserable face. “This is _huge_. I was devastated. I went home and I fucking _cried_ for days. I went home to my dad because I had nowhere else to go!”

Sirius winces, but presses on.

“So you’re saying I---what? Left you? Why? What did you do?”

“We had an argument and I said something that hurt you. I had no idea it was so serious. But you just--turned on your heel and left.”

“Well, what did you say?”

“I don’t remember it word for word, it was so long ago.” Remus tugs at his hair in despair. “I think I--must have implied that I don’t need you and I don’t have faith in us and you--you turned on your heel and Disapparated. I waited but you didn’t come back. I wanted to explain--I--it was a big deal to me that you could even entertain the idea that I was spying--”

“I just went for a walk to cool my head!” Sirius roars. The memory of that particular evening unravels for him like a Muggle film reel: chain smoking on his walk on the banks of the Thames, his anger unfurling, maturing into a quiet, cold rage, dropping into Nisa for a bottle of whisky, coming back to find an empty flat. “And you were gone without a word! For a month! What the fuck, Moony?”

“Dumbledore sent me away for a mission, Sirius. To the werewolves of Man. I couldn’t do anything about it. I had a portkey, I had to go. And when I came back--you’d packed all my things into my suitcase and left it in the--” Remus chokes on the words.

Sirius has to sit down lest his legs give out just like that, by the kitchen sink.

“It really hurt me.” He walks slowly back to the living room and sinks down against the sofa. “I don’t remember what it was exactly. But it cut me to the bone. I thought you didn’t want me anymore. I remember lying on the floor crying--bawling, really, listening to Joy Division like the idiot I was--and thinking that if it hurts just the tiniest bit more I was going to die. I obviously didn’t know real despair yet. But that--you leaving and James and Lily going into hiding--it really broke me. I wasn’t the same afterwards.”

“Yeah, well, neither was I.” Remus comes in and sits down next to him. His knees make a funny sound. “It was probably stupid to hold it against you, but I did, because it somehow made easier to understand what came later. I thought you just _broke_. You were toeing a fine line for a long time, which I knew, didn’t I, because I was with you the whole time and I didn’t do anything about it--and with your family history--I’m so sorry, Sirius. I believed it. I did exactly what you said I’d do, that is: stuck my head in the sand and wanted to wait it out. And it--it played so nicely into what everyone was saying. Into what we knew about what happened. I believed it. I’m a piece of shit. I’m sorry.”

Remus’ voice sounds weird and when Sirius glances at him he instantly regrets it. Remus’ face, normally undemonstrative, bland even, is like an open wound. It’s terrible to look at and it tugs at something inside Sirius, too.

“That was the appeal of it, I guess,” he says, his voice surprisingly calm and steady. “That whole story. How easy it was to pin it all on mad Sirius. Everyone knew I had a temper and a drinking habit. It was obvious I had all kinds of issues. Hell, it still seems a lot more probable than Peter being culpable, doesn’t it?”

“Not really.” Remus sighs. “Not if you think about it from the perspective of what we discovered last year. Which is all I’ve been doing since last year. Ah. Fuck it.”

He gets up, knees cracking again, reaches for a little box that is wedged behind the records on the shelf and sits back down again with his legs crossed. Inside the box, there is a lighter and two hand-rolled cigarettes that quickly turn out to be joints.

Remus passes the one he lighted to Sirius and gets up again.

“I’m sorry for being such a prick,” Sirius says, with feeling, watching Remus pick the music. Remus’ back is tense. “I didn’t know what to--how to cope with things. I’m still kind of vague on that. But I’ll try not to be such a twat about it. Merlin.” He exhales slowly. “We should listen to The Doors. You have no idea how many times I’ve imagined myself listening to _The End_.”

“No, that’s just going to be depressing.” Remus sends him a quick glance over his shoulder. It’s warm and somewhat devious at the same time. “We shouldn’t be getting stuck in the past. Let’s be more about the present. Or even looking forward to the future.”

Sirius rolls his eyes, but lets Remus put on Suede on cassette tape. They smoke the joint to a very short butt, reclining against the sofa and listening to _Dog Man Star_. When side A ends, Sirius feels too heavy to get up and change it, so he just sighs and leans against Remus, and one of Remus’ knees bumps against his thigh.

Later, he’s lying in his transfigured bed, lights off, when he hears footsteps in the hall and entering his bedroom.

“Do you mind?” Remus whispers even though this is his house and his bed. Everything here is his, so Sirius is not sure what exactly he should be minding, but he just says:

“Not at all.”

Remus lifts the duvet and slides underneath it, behind Sirius. They are not touching, but Sirius is immensely aware of Remus’ proximity. It feels right, too, to have Remus in his bed again, his warm weight, measured breaths.

He adjusts his position and sneaks a hand behind himself, to grasp Remus’ hand under the covers. It’s warm and dry, Remus’ palm, and quite familiar. Sirius curls his fingers around it and brings it up around himself to land on his bare chest. Remus inhales sharply.

“Padfoot--”

“Shh.” Sirius drags Remus' palm up his chest, to his throat, where it exerts the slightest bit of pressure, and then down, to his hip. Remus’ fingers curl around it and Sirius moves against him, pressing his back and his arse against Remus’ front. This he couldn’t have forgotten, the frisson that goes down his spine, the heady feeling of blood pounding in his veins.

Remus presses his hand to Sirius’ abdomen tightly. He surely must feel now just how thin Sirius has become, like he could encircle his waist with his hands, squeeze his skinny arms in his big palms. It doesn’t seem like it’s doing anything to dissuade Remus, however, since there’s now an erection pressed to the small of Sirius’ back.

Remus breathes hotly into his neck and presses his lips to the nape and Sirius abandons all pretense: he turns onto his back and drags Remus on top of him, and oh, this is so right, Remus’ shoulders under his hands, Remus’ thigh pressing between his legs. His libido fortunately makes an appearance as well and he feels himself stiffen in response.

“Sirius.” Remus props himself up on his elbows. “Is this--are you--”

“Yeah, let’s do this.” He pulls at Remus’ pyjamas, breathless. “Come on, Moony.”

They undress awkwardly, pushing the duvet to the floor, finding each other by touch in the dark. Remus seems to have more scars, but other than that his body seems the same as it was, bony and rangy, surprisingly strong for someone so thin. He wonders fleetingly if Remus has done this with someone else during their time apart, but he must have, thirteen years is a long fucking time, and if so, if they felt the same, pressed down into the mattress, Remus’ mouth open at their neck, his hand tangled in their hair. This thought actually turns Sirius on even more: that Remus strayed into somebody else’s arms and here he was, back with Sirius, now taking him in hand and stroking. Sirius gasps loudly, then moans, throwing his head back with abandon. They’re all alone in the Yorkshire countryside, nobody around for a mile, and Remus is making love to him again, so if there ever was a good opportunity for a wanton moan, this is it.

Afterwards, they lie side by side in the dark, breath slowing, sweat drying on their skin. Sirius wipes his mouth with the back of his hand with satisfaction.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” he says, the first thing that comes to his mind.

“I’m not sure if I can either.” Remus presses his face into the juncture of Sirius’ neck and shoulder. “Maybe I’m just stoned out of my mind.”

“That’s a brilliant high, then.” Sirius stretches out his arm. It’s so dark he imagines it extending rather than sees it. “Do you know what we should do now?”

“What?”

“Find Pete. He’s out there somewhere. We should get him.”

“Yeah,” Remus breathes. “And break his legs so that he can’t get away again.”

“Honestly, sometimes I’m just scared of you, Moony.”

Remus chuckles wetly into his neck.

“Morbid jokes aside, I think we have to find him. End this.”

“Yeah. Let’s do that.”

He’s strangely moved by this, which is probably unsettling seeing as there have been threats of violence against their former-best-mate mentioned, but still, there are tears gathering in his eyes. He doesn’t cry. He’s Sirius. But now he also doesn’t drink to cope with things anymore. Maybe he’s a new Sirius, a fresh and improved version, if he could call himself fresh after twelve years in the same cell. But he has Remus back, which makes for a fundamental difference.

He smiles and lifts a hand to stroke Remus’ hair away from his forehead. An owl hoots outside, in the pitch black of Yorkshire night.


End file.
